Robert Fulford: Once again, burying ‘the American dream’

Once again, burying ‘the American dream’

After Rajat Gupta was found guilty of insider trading in New York last week, several jurors left the courtroom weeping. The foreman explained that the jurors wanted to believe the charge was not true, but the evidence was overwhelming. They were touched by the immigrant saga of this Wall Street financier from India. They liked and admired him.

“Here’s a man who came to this country and was a wonderful example of the American dream,” the jury foreman said. Yet he committed the very crime Americans have in recent years learned to despise: He was a wealthy man who used his position illegally to get still wealthier, at the expense of others.

Reading that news story, I lingered over three words, “the American dream.” This phrase carries a kind of magic for some Americans. Recent years have given it a fresh wave of popularity; it appeared on 153 occasions in the New York Times during the last 12 months. You can find it everywhere from real-estate ads to the subtitle of Barack Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.

It’s usually dealt with in the most solemn tones, like a quote from the national anthem. Yet it strikes me, a persistent admirer of American life and culture, as both vain and misleading. What does it mean, if anything?

The historian who popularized it in 1921, James Truslow Adams, defined it as the vision of a country where people make their way according to their ability, regardless of birth or position. Of course no such society exists or ever did, but Adams saw this as a specifically American goal. It’s a version of American Exceptionalism, the belief that America is uniquely important. It carries vaguely insulting elements of chauvinism, as if the U.S. proved its virtue simply by dreaming worthy dreams. It hints that other countries don’t do their best to offer similar opportunities, or fail to treat citizens with the same kind of fairness.

These days, a reference to the American dream usually turns out to be a dirge. National Public Radio recently did a longish feature, “American Dream Faces Harsh New Reality,” mainly about the town of Lorain, Ohio. Lorain “used to embody this dream,” but no longer. A resident said on the program: “Now you can see what it is. Nothing. The shipyards are gone, the Ford plant is gone, the steel plant is gone.”

A recent article on bank failures reports that minorities hurt by the foreclosure mess were “the very people our government had pushed to embrace the American dream of home ownership.” A book reviewer praises a young adult novel about trolls for embodying the American dream “at a time when the American dream has failed so many.” A report on American movies shown at a festival says they emphasize the American dream turned nightmare. Sometimes the keening turns nonsensical: The closing of Filene’s Basement, a discount store in Boston, drew a letter to the editor of the Times calling this event “a symbol of the fading away of the American dream.”

Like Obama’s book, these quotations suggest that the current failures of the economy have wiped out the hopes of the people, which now must be revived. But to think this way is to misremember history. I’m not sure that anyone but politicians and advertising copy writers ever took this phrase so seriously. Americans have always been too skeptical to embrace an idea of their future that’s pure rhetoric.

The real energy of America, as reflected in its culture, was never given to fantasies. In good times and bad, the best novelists and playwrights have always looked on American life with sharply critical eyes.

Far being dreamers, the American artists who expressed the national spirit have been anti-dreamers, dream de-bunkers. Artists ranging from Mark Twain to Ernest Hemingway to Tennessee Williams have made it their business to explode dreamy visions of their country. In 1949, as the post-war economy was heating up, Arthur Miller wrote the most admired play of that era, Death of a Salesman, about Willy Loman, who believed in what he might well have called the American dream. But Miller’s purpose was to tell America that this was an empty and self-destructive fantasy, poisonous to the spirit.

Optimism comes and goes with prosperity, and always has. But those who speak so lugubriously of the fading American dream are sentimentalists who mourn a mood of the past that never existed.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.